And there are plans to expand similar measures to mobile phones and public WiFi.

In 2011, the British government unveiled a voluntary public-private plan to help parents block their children’s access to pornography and other undesirable materials online. One of the main elements of the plan had the United Kingdom’s top four ISPs (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin—who collectively comprise 88 percent of British Internet users) instituting varying levels of opt-in filtering for new customers.

Now, 18 months in, the charity that pushed for these changes—known as “active choice”—seems largely happy with what’s been implemented. The organization hopes that similar systems are rolled out to public commercial Wi-Fi hotspots, mobile phone providers, and all existing customers. Today ISPs remain free to choose whichever filtering company they want.

For years, the UK nonprofit has been lobbying against what it calls the “commercialization and sexualization of children,” particularly in storefront displays, advertising, and other media. In June 2011, Mothers' Union published an extensive report: “Letting Children be Children—Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialization and Sexualization of Childhood,” which helped spawn the government’s new policies.

The report details examples such as children being exposed at an inappropriate age to online pornography and other materials better suited for adults. Worse still, Mothers' Union heard complaint after complaint from worried parents that didn’t know where they could turn. This month, Bailey was asked to review the UK government’s efforts to stem this scourge.

One third of new TalkTalk customers say “yes”

The four ISPs take different approaches. TalkTalk, for example, claims to be the UK’s only ISP that offers filtering at the networking level as opposed to a filtering application that parents can download.

Since March 2012, new TalkTalk users have been prompted to choose options for “HomeSafe,” the moniker that TalkTalk has given its own system. It can block not only porn, but also gambling or violent and suicide-themed sites. Individual URLs can also be blocked by adjusting the settings in a given account.

For now, the company says that around 730,000 out of four million customers have signed up for it, including one out of every three new customers that have children.

“Around 80 percent of customers surveyed who had been asked to make an active choice thought being prompted to set up controls was a good thing and 60 percent of those who set up parental controls said they wouldn’t have done so if they hadn’t been prompted,” the company’s CEO, Dido Harding, wrote in September 2012. “We are now helping to keep more than half a million homes safer by filtering out harmful content, and we are exploring ways of rolling out active choice to our existing customers.”

No bulletproof solution

Similarly, BT provides filtration software on its new customer installation CD, “where [new customers] are forced to make a choice about having individual filters on or off. And BT writes to its existing customers at least annually, encouraging them to review child protection settings,” a BT spokesperson told Ars.

“We continue to investigate ISP-level filters. We are clear, however, that no technical solution currently available can provide 100 percent protection for a household. There is no substitute for parental engagement and diligence in monitoring children’s use of the Internet. Our child protection package helps parents to exercise such diligence.”

However, the company declined to provide the number of how many users were taking advantage of the opt-in filters, “because it is commercially confidential.”

But BT added that parents “can also limit the time spent online by children every day; receive e-mail and text alerts if children try to visit blocked sites or chat-rooms; control their children's use of social media; and get reports on children's online activity.”

Eventually, the company also noted, “this process will be extended to cover all devices that connect to the home broadband line so customers will not be able to delay or avoid making a choice on which filters they want.”

“When people join Virgin Media we will proactively communicate details around parental controls, enabling customers to make well-informed choices about the technical and behavioral steps they can take to protect their families online,” the company told The Telegraph in 2012. (The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment.)

Next steps

Reg Bailey of the Mothers' Union also told Ars that he’d eventually like to see a system where parents are forced to prove to the ISP that they’re the account holder by typing in a code that can only be found on a credit card statement. With that code, the user would then have to actively decide to opt-in for filtering or to leave access as completely open.

“People like Symantec say that we have some technical issues to overcome—there are crudities about the way that filters work and that [can leave users frustrated],” he said.

"Whatever you put, it is going to be less than perfect—the best filter is between here,” he said, pointing to his temple. He noted that of the 14 recommendations that he put forward to the UK government in 2011, “we’re there on nine.”

Eventually, Bailey said he'd like to also extend what currently exists at the ISP level to mobile phones, so that parents can close an obvious loophole for their kids on their smartphones. Similarly, Bailey said he’d also like to broaden this type of voluntary plan to large-scale Wi-Fi networks, like those found at Starbucks or McDonald’s.

“There was a great willingness to work these things through in an environment that does not involve legislation,” he noted.

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar

49 Reader Comments

You know what, kids will figure out some way to get to pornographic material one way or another. Its just human nature. This is just another speed bump on the way to having that awkward talk with your parents.

I'm perfectly fine with account holders being able to opt into something like this. It seems like it would be helpful not just for parents but for businesses that have an open wifi network. I'd imagine ISP level filtering is better than what you can do as an end-user (though I don't really know.)

Heck, I'm even fine with the ISP making people actively choose one way or another.

What I'm not okay with are the hints in these quotes that the ideal is to make them mandatory.

I'm glad that they are offering this. I will use OpenDNS in my house when my son gets older but I know people who want to filter their Internet at a router level and don't know how. Yeah it's not bulletproof, but at least it protects a kid from accidentally stumbling into it.

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

You know what, kids will figure out some way to get to pornographic material one way or another. Its just human nature. This is just another speed bump on the way to having that awkward talk with your parents.

In my teens, I would have been trying like crazy to get my hands on the block list, which I would have viewed as a treasure trove of useful information.

Not that we had PCs when I was a kid. Back then, it was hiding on the car floor with Dad's playboy. But the thought's the same : -)

It must be a pretty weak filter if 20% of households are using it. A neighbour of ours got sucked into the "filter the internet" thing, and bought a filtering program. When I asked them 6 months later if it was still in place. The answer was yes. When I mentioned this to my wife, she told me I had asked them the wrong question. The right question was "have you given the kids the password yet"?

Turned out the kids needed to access all kinds of sites just to complete their homework. Wikipedia does contain the odds risqué photograph after all, but blocking all of Wikipedia just doesn't work. On the other hand if you are allowing everything Wikipedia allows, then there isn't much left to block.

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

Let me summarize what everyone reading this is thinking:

But do you have any basis for that thought? That's what I thought.

If I had to guess, he's relying on the basis of "not being completely paranoid and moronic". Just a hunch.

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

Let me summarize what everyone reading this is thinking:

But do you have any basis for that thought? That's what I thought.

If I had to guess, he's relying on the basis of "not being completely paranoid and moronic". Just a hunch.

He's actually using ESP to communicate. After reading the first comment, I was like huh? The gov is trying to protect the men but not the children from porn... and then I read Ryan's summary and I was like... that's what I'm thinking!

Filters at the network level make me a little nervous. It doesn't sound all that bad in an opt-in implementation, but mission creep can be a risk. The idea of content filtering happening behind the scenes doesn't sit well with me at all.

The software solutions offered by BT, Virgin, and Sky seem like much better options. Deciding what content one's family should access is a very personal choice and giving users more granular control over the filter seems to make much more sense. Plus, software solutions make it much easier to tackle vectors like P2P networks for accessing content.

The only real upside to a network level solution is that it would make things a lot less complicated for the tech-illiterate crowd, but I think an inconvenience is perfectly OK. If you want to censor your/your children's access to information, you should be willing to put forth some extra effort to implement a solution. Corporations or governments curating lists of objectionable content doesn't seem like the right direction to go, especially when it comes to the vague concept of obscene. These are personal choices for individuals to make.

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is: Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. If your family can't chew their steak...figure out how to implement some parental controls. If the ISP's will offer that software for free, than great, everybody wins.

You know what, kids will figure out some way to get to pornographic material one way or another. Its just human nature. This is just another speed bump on the way to having that awkward talk with your parents.

In my teens, I would have been trying like crazy to get my hands on the block list, which I would have viewed as a treasure trove of useful information.

Not that we had PCs when I was a kid. Back then, it was hiding on the car floor with Dad's playboy. But the thought's the same : -)

Just go to the library and check out the National Geographic section... it may not be "sexy", but at that age imagination is king. Oh, also art books with paintings from the Renaissance to present time would be another area.

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

Exactly how much porn are you watching -- so much it's affecting your income? You need help :-)

Reminds me of this guy I used to work with who would duck off to the cubicles 3 times a day... gross!

Again I think the main issue is not stopping kids from searching for porn. Obviously any kid who has some computer smarts will figure it out. It is really more effective at the accidental stuff. Such as some kid googling "cowgirl tips" discovering a whole new meaning to the words. A lot of parents have no idea how to use a computer and wouldn't know the difference between a modem and a router. Start talking about tcp/ip filtering and you may well be speaking simlish. A least it gives them a tool (albeit a rather ineffective and limiting one) to help protect from accidental exposure for very young children. But I agree it would be much better to sit with your kids and teach them how to "safely" use google and teach them how to act on the Internet and who not to chat with, etc.. Better yet just show them a couple of cat videos on youtube, and that will take up all their Internet time.

Filters at the network level make me a little nervous. It doesn't sound all that bad in an opt-in implementation, but mission creep can be a risk. The idea of content filtering happening behind the scenes doesn't sit well with me at all...

...One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is: Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. If your family can't chew their steak...figure out how to implement some parental controls. If the ISP's will offer that software for free, than great, everybody wins.

Damn you for writing my post before I did! You've even pre-quoted Twain ahead of me! ;-)Kudos

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

Exactly how much porn are you watching -- so much it's affecting your income? You need help :-)

Reminds me of this guy I used to work with who would duck off to the cubicles 3 times a day... gross!

I can help you here. One of the main drivers behind men pushing for more money is getting sex. Believe it or not, many feminists aren't lesbians, they're women that simply want to find a suitable mate. Problem is, they're not really marriage material for any happy self-respecting man - most of them are bitter, cynical and lazy (not personal experience, but I have one friend too many who decided to jump the gun and marry such a woman). They also often require for man to have a significant source of income for them to even consider mating.

To a man, unlike a woman, sex is a biological need for evolutionary reasons. This need will drive the man to eventually mate with undesirable woman if no other outlet exists. Porn provides this outlet, in turn leaving many of the aforementioned women without a mate. This also lowers a drive to make a money-oriented career for a man, as with base need satisfied man can start looking for other women with different interests instead of succumbing to base need and requests of the woman who will require certain conditions for fulfillment of that base need..

There was an old anecdote in the 70s: "You should always wait for the right one. But you should marry a couple of times while looking".Popularity of porn is likely one of the factors that enables men to forego the "marry the wrong one while looking" part. And that leaves many of the low quality women unhappy with their lack of a stable mate. This is likely a major reason for the strong feminist backlash against porn.

Porn is not inherently harmful, nor it's an exploitation of women many feminist would like to argue. Porn stars are some of the safest (vigourous STD checks) and most well paid jobs. The problem lies in things like consquences of unsafe sex, revenge porn, rapes and forced prostitution. Teenagers just need education on what is right and what is wrong and why.

Oh, and there are lots of virues and malware on porn sites. That also need user education.

Again I think the main issue is not stopping kids from searching for porn. Obviously any kid who has some computer smarts will figure it out. It is really more effective at the accidental stuff. Such as some kid googling "cowgirl tips" discovering a whole new meaning to the words. A lot of parents have no idea how to use a computer and wouldn't know the difference between a modem and a router. Start talking about tcp/ip filtering and you may well be speaking simlish. A least it gives them a tool (albeit a rather ineffective and limiting one) to help protect from accidental exposure for very young children. But I agree it would be much better to sit with your kids and teach them how to "safely" use google and teach them how to act on the Internet and who not to chat with, etc.. Better yet just show them a couple of cat videos on youtube, and that will take up all their Internet time.

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

Exactly how much porn are you watching -- so much it's affecting your income? You need help :-)

Reminds me of this guy I used to work with who would duck off to the cubicles 3 times a day... gross!

I can help you here. One of the main drivers behind men pushing for more money is getting sex. Believe it or not, many feminists aren't lesbians, they're women that simply want to find a suitable mate. Problem is, they're not really marriage material for any happy self-respecting man - most of them are bitter, cynical and lazy (not personal experience, but I have one friend too many who decided to jump the gun and marry such a woman). They also often require for man to have a significant source of income for them to even consider mating.

To a man, unlike a woman, sex is a biological need for evolutionary reasons. This need will drive the man to eventually mate with undesirable woman if no other outlet exists. Porn provides this outlet, in turn leaving many of the aforementioned women without a mate. This also lowers a drive to make a money-oriented career for a man, as with base need satisfied man can start looking for other women with different interests instead of succumbing to base need and requests of the woman who will require certain conditions for fulfillment of that base need..

There was an old anecdote in the 70s: "You should always wait for the right one. But you should marry a couple of times while looking".Popularity of porn is likely one of the factors that enables men to forego the "marry the wrong one while looking" part. And that leaves many of the low quality women unhappy with their lack of a stable mate. This is likely a major reason for the strong feminist backlash against porn.

While I believe that teenagers will (and should be encouraged to in order to get online) to find their way around blocks, pre-teens are a different matter. They really don't need to stumble across the darker side of the internet just yet. We have had talks with the eldest and she understands to come and find us if she sees something she finds uncomfortable, however I use OpenDNS and Google SafeSearch to do basic filtering before it gets to her. Using a squid proxy on the Pi is another way I do light monitoring of the web traffic. The family PC is in the living room next to the TV. The tablets all disconnect after 8pm.

For me that is enough for now - Open DNS blocks most of the dodgy stuff, including social networks. Random (infrequent) checks on the squid logs and the family PC's internet caches is another (there is only so much eyeballing of a 10 year old girls internet history a grown man can take.)

I would not want this level of filtering at the ISP level though - as it is, I choose what gets blocked, filtered or not. I can allow some devices to bypass filtering easily, or lock things down. BT and Virgins approach is a good one - the user is encouraged to install stuff in order to do the filtering. All of these applications however have a common problem - they don't do multi-user computers very well - leading to what one commentator above quoted "have you given them the password yet".

While Virgins software is a bit of a pain in that respect, I have just switched to BT as my ISP and will be trying their stuff out on a VM to see if it handles multiple users correctly. I don't have much hope though.

They threatened legislation if the ISPs did not "volunteer". I'm weary of this kind of government pressure because it eventually leads to self-censorship or some implicit regulation, not to mention regulatory capture (security and filtering company cronyism).

IcarusFly wrote:

Again I think the main issue is not stopping kids from searching for porn. Obviously any kid who has some computer smarts will figure it out. It is really more effective at the accidental stuff. Such as some kid googling "cowgirl tips" discovering a whole new meaning to the words. A lot of parents have no idea how to use a computer and wouldn't know the difference between a modem and a router. Start talking about tcp/ip filtering and you may well be speaking simlish. A least it gives them a tool (albeit a rather ineffective and limiting one) to help protect from accidental exposure for very young children. But I agree it would be much better to sit with your kids and teach them how to "safely" use google and teach them how to act on the Internet and who not to chat with, etc.. Better yet just show them a couple of cat videos on youtube, and that will take up all their Internet time.

Google already takes of that for you. They use an always-on filter now. There were a few articles about google's silent change a while back. They removed the no-filter setting. You can only bypass the filter, per search, by using the "right" keywords. Try googling "cowgirl tips" for yourself.

Sure, you'll get articles about sex, but it's all sanitized for you. Essentially meta-results. Like Cosmopolitian, or sex therapists giving advice. But nothing pornographic or even erotic (the later part is problematic to get without spammy results now due to this change)

It's not about stopping Children, it's about stopping men from watching porn, so the government and feminists can force men to marry and have kids. they're trying to put men back into the economic machine, that makes everyone money, but it'll fail, hopefully.

Exactly how much porn are you watching -- so much it's affecting your income? You need help :-)

Reminds me of this guy I used to work with who would duck off to the cubicles 3 times a day... gross!

I can help you here. One of the main drivers behind men pushing for more money is getting sex. Believe it or not, many feminists aren't lesbians, they're women that simply want to find a suitable mate. Problem is, they're not really marriage material for any happy self-respecting man - most of them are bitter, cynical and lazy (not personal experience, but I have one friend too many who decided to jump the gun and marry such a woman). They also often require for man to have a significant source of income for them to even consider mating.

To a man, unlike a woman, sex is a biological need for evolutionary reasons. This need will drive the man to eventually mate with undesirable woman if no other outlet exists. Porn provides this outlet, in turn leaving many of the aforementioned women without a mate. This also lowers a drive to make a money-oriented career for a man, as with base need satisfied man can start looking for other women with different interests instead of succumbing to base need and requests of the woman who will require certain conditions for fulfillment of that base need..

There was an old anecdote in the 70s: "You should always wait for the right one. But you should marry a couple of times while looking".Popularity of porn is likely one of the factors that enables men to forego the "marry the wrong one while looking" part. And that leaves many of the low quality women unhappy with their lack of a stable mate. This is likely a major reason for the strong feminist backlash against porn.

Are you for real?

Yes, he is real. There is a valid movement behind this.

Anyway, in Europe they plan to ban porn statewide. I'm not from there so I doesn't know much about the underlying things.

Personally I don't care much because I'm not into porn, I prefer to spend my time playing games from GOG. But people do have reason and they do have valid viewpoint. And they knew exactly why some law are being pushed and tabled.

I mean, it just like we look at SOPA and PIPA and how copyright law will end up into net censor. Who lobby who and why. The same with this porn law thingy.

And this does absolutely nothing if someone knows how to use TOR. To fablefox, you are behind the times, they have unequivocally dismissed that proposed ban. It simply isn't going to happen.

Wheaty73 wrote:

While I believe that teenagers will (and should be encouraged to in order to get online) to find their way around blocks, pre-teens are a different matter. They really don't need to stumble across the darker side of the internet just yet.

Wheaty, I hate to burst your bubble, but most pre-teens know more about sex than adults did 80 years ago today. It has not been a 'mystery' to children and teenagers for a good long time now.